The summer has not been an easy one for aficionados or practitioners of science writing. There was, of course, the ongoing, death-by-1,000-cuts Jonah Lehrer fiasco, where, over a period of more than a month, one of

Seventy years-ago, a pioneering American scientist named Pearl Kendrick combined killed, whole cell pertussis bacterium with weakened diphtheria and tetanus toxins to create the first combination diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccine. It was an almost instantaneous success: In 1934, six

Two weeks ago, Jim Romenesko revealed that Jonah Lehrer had recycled work from a 2011 Wall Street Journal column for a recent blog post on NewYorker.com. As anyone who has been following this knows, plenty more revelations followed, including accusations that Lehrer had

See bottom of post for update. On Tuesday, TLC posted “Why shouldn’t we vaccinate our children,” which was one of the all-time worst pieces written about vaccines. It had outright falsehoods and oodles of misleading

See the bottom of this post for an update on the Sun-Times‘s “proud support” of AutismOne. On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published a fawning, credulous Q&A with Jenny McCarthy, who has been more responsible than